"Why, how now, Babel,
whither wilt thou build?
I see old Holbom, Charing Cross, the Strand,
Are going to St. Giles's-in-the-Field."
- Tom Freeman (1614).

Of all the many ways of getting to
know a town or district there is perhaps none better than that which
results from having the time, and inclination, to wander about and
acquire the knowledge in a gradual and intimate manner. It is a method
for which few but residents over a long period can obtain sufficient
leisure, and they in the vast majority of instances lack the
inclination. Maybe at the other extreme are those who, with a
stentorian guide, are rapidly run round the place under review, and,
with but the briefest pauses at the recognized "sights", are shown
everything in a few hours.

In the case of London it might almost
be said that neither of these extreme methods is much good. Residents
and visitors alike find London impossibly large in square mileage,
impossibly crowded with things to be seen, traditions or memories to be
recalled; thus it is that the resident is generally content to know,
and that inadequately, the district or districts in which his social or
business circle moves, and to have but a hazy view in regard to most of
the remainder; while the visitor is mostly content to limit himself to
certain "sights" selected in accordance with his individual taste, or
on the plan of some guide. To visit the main buildings, parks, or
monuments of a city, is only to see it partially. Indeed there are
almost as many ways of "seeing" a place as there are visitors to see
it. Visitors, however, may be divided into two vastly different
classes: those who are content to be shown the " sights", and those who
have a desire to gain something of that more intimate kind of knowledge
which comes of wandering about seeing the life of a city, and happening
only from time to time upon the acknowledged "lions" of the locality.
In the vast extent of London - which may be said to be represented by
houses, houses all the way for a distance of some twenty miles from
east to west, and somewhat about the same from north to south - there
are so many objects of interest, places of notable associations, or
districts with their own particular "note" that it might well demand,
as it has indeed1 been accorded, a library for its presentation in
anything approximating to its literary entirety.

In its great system of motor
omnibuses, London has what may be regarded by many people as the best
means of seeing the externalities of the great city. By means of many
interlinking routes, it is possible to get from well nigh any point
within the metropolitan area to any other point; and along the routes
followed a goodly proportion of the "lions" may be glimpsed in passing,
or paused at and visited, while a real knowledge may thus be gained of
the relative positions of the astounding number of districts comprised
within the vastness of London.

It is not surprising that some of the
main starting-points of London's motor-bus routes are found in the
neighbourhood of the great railway termini - notably at Liverpool
Street, London Bridge, and Victoria. Comparatively few people, it may
be believed, start out to see London, at the moment of their arrival;
it has therefore seemed better to take radiating centres rather than
railway stations as starting-points. In a necessarily brief survey of
the incalculable mileage of her highways it is not easy to avoid at
once the aridity of a mere directory of streets, the staccato
statements of a guide-book, and the undue emphasizing of certain places
to the exclusion of others. London cannot be epitomized. Each of the
centres which I have chosen might of itself provide materials for a
volume many times the size of this.

By intersection and criss-crossing of
routes it is possible, with but few changes, to get from any one point
to another in the whole vast extent of a "Greater London", which
extends over close upon seven hundred square miles. That Greater London
- the area within which the Metropolitan Police have jurisdiction -
includes many places which the true Londoner still regards as being
"out in the country"; here it is to the more central highways of the
great metropolis that we must confine ourselves.

II

"I think the full tide
of human existence is at Charing Cross."
- Samuel Johnson.

If we think of London and all that it
has to show, in terms of the routes which are followed by its
innumerable motor-buses, it is probably the radial centre of Charing
Cross that first comes to mind.

From this centre, with its big hotels
and numerous shipping offices, east and west, north and south, we may
travel into any part of the far-spreading capital. The centre itself,
too, is one of interest. Charing Cross is immediately to the south of
Trafalgar Square, and not, as many people think, the railway station of
Charing Cross a little to the east along the Strand. In the forecourt
of that station is a modern representation of the ancient "Eleanor
Cross" which gave to the one-time village of Charing, situate between
the cities of London and Westminster, the doubled name by which the
immediate neighbourhood is now known. The ancient cross - destroyed by
fanatical zealots in the mid-part of the seventeenth century - stood on
the spot where now stands the old equestrian statue of Charles the
First.

Trafalgar Square
This square, dominated by the lofty Nelson Column, has been described
as the finest site in Europe. A century ago it was covered with the
narrow alleys of a sordid slum.
To many people Charing Cross and Trafalgar
Square are almost convertible terms. The former marks the junction of
half a dozen roads, the most notable of which are the Strand, running
to the east, and Whitehall to the south. Many are the changes that have
taken place here since the memorial to a devoted queen consort was
replaced by the statue of a martyred king. Old Northumberland House was
cleared away and the broad Northumberland Avenue cut through to the
Thames within living memory. Earlier still, there was a great clearance
of small slum buildings in front of the Royal Mews, when Trafalgar
Square - "the finest site in Europe" - was laid out close upon a
hundred years ago, and the site of the Royal Mews itself became that of
the National Gallery which forms the north side of the square.

The main feature of the square is the
lofty Nelson column - surmounted by a figure of the great seaman, and
guarded at the base by Landseer's four great couchant lions. Other
monuments need not be particularized, but by the National Gallery
stands; a bronze statue to that great Englishman who became the first
great American - George Washington. A little to the north, in the
roadway between the National Portrait Gallery and the porticoed front
of the church of St. Martin's-in-the-fields, is the over-massive
monument to the memory of Edith Cavell, the English nurse martyred in
Brussels by the invading Germans in 1915. Northwards from here run the
old St. Martin's Lane, towards the Seven Dials and Bloomsbury, and the
new Charing Cross Road, towards Camden Town and the "northern heights".

Returning to our radial point of
Charing Cross, we find that to the four points of the compass bus
routes may be followed thence, or at least to other ganglia of that
traffic which may be said to be the nerves of our corporate city life.
It is indeed, as I have suggested, perhaps the most notable setting-out
point from which may be started an exploration of London along its
main-travelled routes, and that not only because of its linking with
those routes, but also because places of great interest are crowded
close around.

The Admiralty Arch
Which forms the eastern end - fronting on Charing Cross - of the
processional way along the Mall from Buckingham Palace.
Standing
on the south side of Trafalgar Square we have before us, looking to the
south, the broad way of Whitehall with, at the far end, the clock-tower
of "Big Ben" dominating the group of the Houses of Parliament. Though
short the distance - Big Ben is just half a mile away - there is much
to claim attention along its brief course. Before passing along it
glances to the left and right may be made: to the left along
Northumberland Avenue - the way of big hotels - towards the river-side
and the Embankment; to the right - under the handsome Admiralty Arch -
is the processional way of the Mall, leading straight to Buckingham
Palace along the north side of the picturesque pleasance of St. James's
Park, with its greenery of turf and trees, its lake lively with various
exotic waterfowl, and its picturesque views of Government buildings old
and modern.

Short as is the distance from
Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, it would provide materials for a
considerable volume by itself. We have not gone many yards before, on
the right, we see the old Admiralty buildings, surmounted by that new
web in which science catches from the air words and signals emitted
maybe from ships lonely amid a waste of waters a thousand miles away.
This became the head-quarters for Admiralty affairs in the reign of
William the Third, and the admired screen shutting off the courtyard
from the street was later added by Robert Adams.

A little farther down Whitehall, after
passing the handsome new War Office buildings, we have on the right the
range of low buildings of the Horse Guards, the mounted sentries at the
entrance to which afford one of London's infrequent touches of military
colour. Opposite is the handsome Banqueting House of James the First -
designed by Inigo Jones as part of a magnificent new palace of
Whitehall, which never materialized further than the existing building.
Here are housed the naval and military relics comprised within the
Royal United Service Museum. It was from a window in the Banqueting
House that Charles the First passed to the scaffold on that momentous
day, 30th January, 1649.

Farther along Whitehall, on the right,
come a succession of massive modern buildings, housing various
Governmental departments. The first turning on the same side, between
the Treasury and the Home Office, is perhaps the most famous street of
its length in the world. This is Downing Street - where No. 10 has for
the past two hundred years been the official residence of successive
British Prime Ministers. The pleasant comfortable old residences are
dwarfed by the more modern neighbouring offices. Immediately in front
is the entrance to the handsome quadrangle of the Foreign Office.

Just beyond Downing Street, in the
centre of Whitehall, rises in dignified simplicity that beautiful
Cenotaph to "The Glorious Dead" who fell in the Great War - a monument
far more moving and impressive than the most ornate of those memorials
scattered up and down the country by which a generation that had
suffered so appallingly sought to give lasting witness to its pride and
grief.

"Not here they fell who
died a world to save;
Not here they lie but in a thousand fields afar.
Here is their living spirit that knows no grave;
Not here they were - but are."

Long, it may well be believed, will
all that is best in the British character move the passer-by to raise
his hat in silent homage to the young manhood of a world-scattered
people united in the faith of freedom, who fell in the struggle against
the Moloch of militarism.

Shortly after passing the Cenotaph and
passing on the left the entrance to the head-quarters of the
Metropolitan Police - New Scotland Yard - we reach Parliament Square.
Right, the way goes to St. James's Park, Birdcage Walk, and Buckingham
Palace; left, immediately to Westminster Bridge, across which pass many
buses and trams to diverge on the farther side along many routes
serving the southern suburbs; while across Parliament Square go some
buses to Victoria and others through by-ways to reach the river again
near Vauxhall.

Parliament Square is assuredly one of
London's main centres of sight-seeing. On the farther side-focal point
of British history for many centuries is Westminster Abbey; while on
the left, shutting off the river along which they are ranged, are the
Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall. Round about us here, too,
are various statues - a specially notable trio which may be mentioned
being Oliver Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, and the Earl of Beaconsfield,
representing as they do national ideas and ideals of dramatic
diversity.

Westminster has long been honoured
with the distinction of being a city, "public complaisance" having
permitted it to continue to bear a courtesy title for which it was not
ecclesiastically qualified. Here we cannot follow the story of
Westminster since it was brought into existence by the establishment on
a marshy island by the Thames of the Abbey from which it was to take
its name; we are concerned more directly with things as they are than
as they were, with the present rather than the past out of which it has
developed, with the beautiful Abbey as we can see it to-day rather than
with the endlessly ramifying record of its storied stones.

Westminster Abbey
North-eastern view from Palace Yard, showing part of the beautiful
Henry the Seventh's Chapel.
St. Peter's Abbey Church of Westminster is
not one of the exceptions to the fairly general rule, that the
magnificent buildings erected by our forefathers are not to be seen to
the best advantage from the outside. Other buildings have in course of
time been all too often permitted to hem them in and prevent their
being seen as beautiful wholes. Of Westminster Abbey some very
impressive partial views may be had. At the eastern end is a very
memorable view of the sixteenth century Henry the Seventh's Chapel,
with, on the left, the far older octagonal Chapter House in which
Parliament met in the thirteenth century. The main entrance to the
Abbey at the western end is most conspicuous for the eighteenth century
twin towers, the beginning of which was the last work undertaken by the
veteran Sir Christopher Wren. The north entrance, or "Solomon's Porch",
opening into the north transept, is that portion which has most
recently been restored, and the view of this side as a whole is broken
by the close contiguity of the church of St. Margaret's. The south side
is close crowded with the Precincts, so that it is not possible to get
any unbroken view of the beautiful - though never completed - whole.
The original design, it may be said, contemplated a tall central spire,
and spires also on the western towers.

Within the Abbey there is so much to
appeal to architectural taste, to the historic sense, and to the
multitude of interests implicit in the fact that Westminster has come
to be regarded as the Valhalla of the nation's great, that it is
possible here to do little more than state that fact. Entering by the
western door - to reach which we pass the slender column memorial to
old Westminster boys who fell in the Crimean War - we come at once into
the grand lofty nave, and to the simplest and most impressive of all
the memorials within the wonderful place. This is the grave of the
Unknown Soldier - the nameless man buried here in Britain's house of
fame to represent those who fell in the Great War of 1914-18. Unknown
by any merely individualizing label, he lies here entitled to the name
of every man who fell in that momentous struggle to save our
civilization.

The burial of an Unknown Soldier as
representative of all those who fell in the War was, as it were, a
consecration of the nation's Valhalla anew, by making it the shrine of
a great idea transcending all the individualities in whose honour
inscribed tablets, memorial busts, and monstrous monuments had
previously been placed in the national shrine. Massive groups of
uninspired marble, however, greatly as they may invite criticism on
close inspection, are more or less lost in the grandeur of the lofty
edifice. Where the memorials are mostly of a more modest character, in
the Poets' Corner, is the spot to which pilgrims are most strongly
drawn. This is the eastern part of the South Transept, with memorials
to or busts of a succession of great and lesser poets from Chaucer to
Tennyson and Browning, many of whom, including the three named, are
actually buried here. Though known as Poets' Corner, this is the shrine
of many men associated with literature and the arts generally. David
Garrick and Sir Henry Irving, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, and Charles
Dickens, for instance, are among those buried here, while the memorials
to those buried otherwhere include Shakespeare and Milton, Robert Burns
and Walter Scott, Oliver Goldsmith and Robert Southey. Near the very
beginning of the "Corner" is a bust of Longfellow - the first memorial
here to an American contributor to the great body of English
literature.

Between the Abbey and the river stands
the ancient Westminster Hall, and the whole range of the Houses of
Parliament from the Clock Tower at the western end of Westminster
Bridge to the Victoria Tower. Westminster Hall also invites to a
lingering stay; it is the surviving portion of the old Westminster
Palace, and was built by William Rufus at the close of the eleventh
century, but was largely rebuilt two centuries later, when its most
notable feature, the recently restored magnificent oaken hammer-beam
roof was erected. In this Hall were holden, for many generations, great
royal banquets and other festivities, including, up to the reign of
George the Fourth, the coronation banquets. Here, too, for centuries
were held the Courts of Justice, until in 1882 the new Law Courts were
opened in the Strand. Many great public events - such as the trial of
Warren Hastings - took place in this hall which has for upwards of
eight hundred years been associated with the governance of the kingdom.

The best general view of the New
Palace of Westminster is that from Westminster Bridge, or from the
opposite side of the river, where the fretted range of its beautiful
Gothic front, tower-terminated at either end, extends for a distance of
about a thousand feet.

Beyond Westminster, by the river side,
is Millbank, with the Tate Gallery as the sightseers' main objective,
and beyond that, Vauxhall Bridge. Our particular bus route, however, is
that which, passing the western end of the Abbey, goes along the modern
highway of offices and shops, Victoria Street, to Victoria Station, and
its ramification of routes. On the way thither we may note on the left,
standing back off the street itself, the most remarkable of recent
additions to London's ecclesiastical architecture, the Roman Catholic
Westminster Cathedral, the lofty campanile of which, rising to the
great height of two hundred and eighty-three feet, is a notable
landmark from many parts of the West End. This magnificent edifice of
red brick with white stone courses, in the early Christian Byzantine
style, has something of a bizarre effect among the neighbouring flats
and mansions. Though it will be long before it takes on that mellowness
which time alone can give to the great work of the architect, the
cathedral should be visited, if for nothing else, for the wonderful
view - given a clear day - which is afforded from its lofty dome-capped
campanile.

III

"Through the long Strand
together let us stray."
- John Gay.

Returning to Charing Cross, we may
briefly indicate some of the more notable features observable on the
easterly journey by way of the Strand to the City. Passing first
Charing Cross Station on the right, we see opposite to it the church of
St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, where lie buried Farquhar the dramatist,
John Hunter the anatomist, Nell Gwynne, and Jack Sheppard (infamy needs
no description). The Strand - gradually being widened so that it grows
to a new thoroughfare - is mostly given over to shops, with some large
hotels. Behind these, on the north side, is Covent Garden, and on the
south the Adelphi and the Savoy, before we reach that turning on the
right which goes to Waterloo Bridge. To the left is the new crescent
Aldwych, that, curving northwards, reaches the Strand again by the
church of St. Clement's Danes. Along the main way, before reaching that
church, we pass another, St. Mary-le-Strand, also enislanded between
opposing streams of traffic, with on the right Somerset House,
head-quarters of the Inland Revenue authorities; close neighbouring its
dingy but dignified front is King's College. On the left is the
cream-toned stone of the massive new beautiful building known as Bush
House; immediately beyond this is the grand block of Australia House,
with its fine portico at the farther end fronting the Gladstone Statue
and St. Clement's Danes, the bells of which on occasion ring the
familiar nursery rhyme of "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St.
Clement's".

Beyond that old island-church on the
left are the Law Courts, the smoke-blacked and weather-worn white of
the stone work of which makes a striking picture as we approach it
under a brilliant afternoon sun. At the farther end of the Law Courts
we reach also the end of the Strand, marked by the rampant "Griffin"
erected as memorial to the removed Temple Bar. Passing it we are in
Fleet Street, with Wren's gatehouse to the Middle Temple on our right,
and just behind it the entrance to the Inner Temple by the old
projecting building (much restored), which, wrongly described as a
palace of Henry the Eighth's, is now preserved as a show place. A few
doors farther on we pass the Cock Tavern - famous for having its place
in poetry as the subject of Tennyson's "Will Water-proofs Lyrical
Monologue". Devotees of port and poetry must be reminded that the
tavern of which Tennyson sang was nearer to Temple Bar and on the north
side of the street. Opposite the present-day tavern is the church of
St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, with a window in memory of Izaak Walton, and
over the vestry door a statue of Queen Elizabeth, removed thither from
Lud Gate when that city portal was demolished in 1786.

Nearly every building, every court and
lane, on either side, as we pass down Fleet Street, recalls memories of
past worthies. Now it has come to be "the street of ink", and passing
down it on a bus the names of London, provincial, dominion, and foreign
journals are seen on either side, and if we pass into the by-ways it is
to find other newspaper offices, printing establishments, and
businesses connected with the Press. A little back from the street on
the south side, as we near Ludgate Circus, are the handsome storeyed
tower and spire (thrice lightning-struck) of St. Bride's Church,
rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the devastating Great Fire.

At Ludgate Circus we reach another
crossing-place of bus routes: northwards go St. Bride Street and the
broad Farringdon Street, southwards goes Bridge Street to the Thames
Embankment and Blackfriars Bridge, with buses and trams for the
transpontine districts and for Kentish and Surrey suburbs. Continuing
eastwards up Ludgate Hill the route takes us past St. Paul's Cathedral,
the mighty dome of which has, as we came down Fleet Street, shown
grandly over the ugly railway bridge that crosses the foot of the hill.
Ludgate Hill has little to claim passing attention, for inevitable
widening has removed much of interest, and this applies not only to the
hill itself, but also to its principal tributary the Old Bailey, which
turns north to the criminal court of that name. On the north side of
the hill is St. Martin's Church - one of those re-erected by Wren after
the Great Fire - the slender spire of which contrasts strikingly with
the great dome of the Cathedral against which it is seen as we go up
the hill.

The Cathedral itself - its forecourt
frequently a scene of pigeon-feeding comparable with that which most
visitors to Venice remember outside St. Mark's - is perhaps best seen
under a bright afternoon sun, which emphasizes the striking contrast of
the blacks and whites of its weathered Portland stone, and seems to
heighten the massive dignity of the great edifice. Something of a
second national Valhalla is the Cathedral - wherein lie buried
Wellington and Nelson, and many other famous naval and military
leaders, and also many celebrated modern artists and other men of
distinction honoured by public burial. Passing the south door with its
pediment-sculptured phœnix, our route may take us along Cannon Street,
across the City's scrap of that ancient Roman highway, Watling Street,
and so up the modern Queen Victoria Street to the City's main centre of
radiating routes at the Mansion House, or - continuing along Cannon
Street, past the railway station of that name and, on the left, the
church of St. Swithin, in the wall of which may be seen an iron grille
encaging the last fragment of London's most ancient monument, that
London Stone from which Rome's highways in Britain are supposed to have
radiated.

IV

"I have twice been going
to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob: not at all,
and it was only nymphs and swains sauntering and trudging."
- Horace Walpole.

Piccadilly Circus seems rather a focal
than a radiating centre, more of a centripetal than a centrifugal
social point; our bus routes come to mind as going to Piccadilly Circus
rather than as going from it. Though several routes meet here it is
that along Piccadilly itself which is mainly notable. The one down the
Haymarket is but a journey of a few hundred yards and we are in
Trafalgar Square; the one down Regent Street by new shops and offices
almost at once reaches Waterloo Place and Pall Mall, the specific
centre of Clubland, with the tall Duke of York's column at the top of
the steps leading down to the Mall and St. James's Park. Left and right
from the column runs Carlton House Terrace - mansions, backing on the
park, which nearly a hundred years ago were erected on what had been
the grounds of Carlton House.

Eastward from the Circus runs Coventry
Street to-wards Leicester Square; north-eastward goes Shaftesbury
Avenue, most theatreful of thoroughfares. More especially interesting
is the north-western route, Regent Street, though its fine colonnaded
curves were long since robbed of their colonnades and are now in rapid
process of change, the long monotonous sweep of level skyline giving
way to such varied skyline as is regarded as contributing in no small
degree to the beauty of London. The colonnaded building on the north
side of the Circus affords little more than a hint of the old-time
colonnade of Regent Street, which was lighter in structure and
projected from the first floor of the buildings, with nothing
super-imposed upon it. This street has come to typify a great shopping
centre. Behind it on the right are the innumerable by-ways of Soho, a
notable residential centre of the eighteenth century that has come to
be a district especially associated with foreign "colonies".

Piccadilly Circus, also threatened
with transmogrification by rebuilding, is often regarded as the special
centre from, which most of the theatres may be reached, and it is
worthy of note that the majority of what are termed the West End
theatres will be found within the eastern portion of a half-mile circle
drawn from Gilbert's beautiful fountain. Piccadilly itself, running to
the westward, is now largely a street of shops during the first half of
its length. There must be many who echo the words of Frederick Locker-Lampson,
one of London's most lyrical lovers:

"Piccadilly! shops,
palaces, bustle and breeze,
The whirring of wheels, and the murmur of trees,
By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,
Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly."

It was a later writer, the genial
essayist G. S. Street, who declared that "there is only one side to
Piccadilly", meaning of course that the loungers of the day most
frequently used one - which side that was I cannot recall. Piccadilly
is said to owe its name to some association with the first shop built
there having been that of a maker of a kind of ruff known as a
piccadill, so that it is only appropriate that it should have developed
into one of the fashionable shopping districts of the metropolis. There
are, however, still some buildings that are not given over to the
display of merchandise. Near to the Circus, on the south side, is the
dignified front of the Geological Museum, and a little farther on the
red-brick church of St. James's built by Sir Christopher Wren. Farther
along, on the opposite side, a small courtyard gives entrance to The
Albany - for over a hundred years familiar as the home of wealthy
bachelors. Then, also on the north side, is the fine frontage of
Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society,
the British Association, the Society of Antiquaries, and other learned
bodies.

In the past Piccadilly was the centre of various
popular exhibitions and entertainments, and during last century, to
name a greatly contrasting trio, Daniel Lambert (87 stones), "The
Living Skeleton" (about 52 stones), and General Tom Thumb were "on
show" here. Freaks and monstrosities have fortunately fallen out of
fashion, thanks to changing public taste, and the exhibitions at the
Royal Academy are nowadays Piccadilly's principal "shows".

Gatehouse, St. James's Palace
Fronting up St. James's Street, the gateway of Henry the Eighth's
palace is the main portion that is left of that monarch's original
building.
A little
beyond Burlington House, there turns off to the right the somewhat
narrow beginning of what may be regarded as Fashion's most famous
thoroughfare - Bond Street, the very name of which has long stood as
indicative of the modes of the moment. Beyond Bond Street - which
affords a bus by-way linking Piccadilly with its parallel highway, of
Oxford Street - comes a broad turning on the left. This is St. James's
Street, leading in its short length to the western end of Pall Mall,
and immediately to St. James's Palace and Marlborough House, the fine
Tudor gatehouse of the Palace fronting us as we go down one of
club-land's favourite streets, its time- and soot-darkened red brick
contrasting greatly with neighbouring buildings. Between the royal
residences a narrow way leads into the Mall in the neighbourhood of
Buckingham Palace. St. James's Street, with its many tributary turnings
-

"where Sacharissa sighed
When Waller read his ditty;
Where Byron lived, and Gibbon died,
And Alvanley was witty" -

has
long been noted as a residential centre for wit and wealth.

Passing beyond the main Piccadilly
region of shops and hotels, we come to where, on the left, is the
pleasant tree-grown tract of the Green Park, across which may be seen
through the trees Buckingham Palace and, beyond, the campanile of
Westminster Cathedral. On the right is the famous mansion of Devonshire
House, doomed to early demolition, the handsome iron gates of which
have been removed and set up farther to the west as a break in the park
railings. Fronting the Green Park, all the way to where the
north-western corner of that pleasance neighbours the south-eastern
corner of Hyde Park, are stately houses, many of them rich in
association with noted people of the past and many of them now utilized
as clubs. Behind these, reached by a celebrated series of by-ways -
Bolton Street, Clarges Street, Half Moon Street, etc. - lies the
fashionable district of Mayfair, and also all that is left of that
quaint bit, Shepherd's Market In this neighbourhood, too, was at one
time held that May Fair to which the district owes its name. The most
westerly but one of these northerly turnings from Piccadilly is the
narrow beginning to Park Lane, which shortly becomes the eastern
boundary of Hyde Park as far as the Marble Arch. Its handsome mansions
- possession of one of which has been long looked upon as the desired
end of social ambition and wealth-look westward over the continuous
extent of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

The last great house of Piccadilly is
Apsley House, given a hundred years ago by a grateful nation to the
victor of Waterloo. Immediately opposite, on one Of the plane-planted
"islands" of this open space, is a statue of the Duke of Wellington,
fronting the house still in the possession of his family. South runs
Grosvenor Place to Victoria, on the left of it a high brick wall
shutting off the extensive grounds of Buckingham Palace. Between the
corner of those grounds and the western limit of the Green Park stands
the Constitution Hill Arch surmounted by a handsome quadriga, with a
figure of Peace in the chariot.

Through the arch - between the Palace
grounds and the Green Park - is Constitution Hill, running down to the
Queen Victoria Memorial at the western end of the Mall and fronting
Buckingham Palace, the latest and probably plainest of the London
houses of British sovereigns. The Palace, fronting on St James's Park
and the Mall, has, especially from its upper windows, a beautiful
outlook across the greenery to Whitehall's varied range of buildings
from the new Admiralty and its handsome arch by the lower weathered
stone-work of the Horse Guards to the massy modern Government offices,
the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey.

The Sunk Garden, Kensington Palace
Sometimes called the Dutch garden, this beautifully kept parterre is in
spring and summer one of London's loveliest spots of floral colour.
Returning to Hyde Park Corner - "Let us
try one more turn ere we quit Piccadilly" - our highway continues
westward past St. George's Hospital at the back of which extend the
squares and streets of Belgravia, the fashionable residential district
more especially associated with the social regime of the Victorian
period. With Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens successively on our
right, the route takes us through Knightsbridge, past the fine Albert
Hall, the Albert Memorial (most lavishly abused of all London's
monuments), to Kensington, the Palace of which stands back in its
pleasant grounds among the trees on the western confines of those
Kensington Gardens which at one time formed the private pleasance of
the palace; then past Holland House, hidden behind the trees of one of
inner London's finest extents of private grounds still remaining, and
so on to Hammersmith and the succession of western suburbs that lie
along what in old coaching days was known as the great Bath Road.

When we look at a map of London, that
highway which, on the whole, appears most notably to approximate
towards a straight thoroughfare continued for any great length, is the
one which, but for bendy bits here and there and a distinctly twisty
bit where it worms through the heart of the City, runs right through
Middlesex from east to west, and in that course undergoes many name
changes. Along it the visitor to London who wishes to get broad effects
from bus-top journeys will get a goodly range of variety in the
different districts through which he passes. With two or three changes
of vehicle the curious traveller might make the journey from the Essex
border to the Buckinghamshire one, passing right across London and its
suburban expatiations. Such a journey might well afford a vivid
impression of the size of London, giving as it does a journey of about
twenty miles without any long sustained break in the continuity of
"bricks and mortar".

Few people, it may be thought, are
those who take such a trans-urban journey as that, and I do not propose
to follow the course of that highway throughout its length, but to
glance here at the more definitely London parts of it as reached from
that celebrated centre of the West-end shopping district, which has
within the memory of many of us definitely acquired the name of Oxford
Circus. In a map of London published in 1897 it was still marked as
Regent Circus, the name which it bore as a break in the way designed to
link the Prince Regent's residence, Carlton House, with the Palace
which he designed, building at what is now Regent's Park - the southern
part of which lies little more than half a mile to the north of the
Circus.

In every direction from Oxford Circus
there has during recent years been much rebuilding, and in every
direction the change is being rapidly intensified. The half-mile length
which connects Oxford Circus with Piccadilly Circus had up to within
recent years retained its "old-fashioned" appearance of the early
nineteenth century, but changes once begun have proceeded so rapidly
that Regent Street will, it may be believed, in a few years have little
left beyond its name to remind us of the period in which it was
planned. Passing along it from Oxford Circus, we find it a street of
palatial shops, the turnings from which will take us on the right to
Bond Street and so to the heart of the residential West End, while by
the turnings on the left we can immediately reach the network of
streets comprised within the Soho district. The first two of the
turnings lead at once into Hanover Square, nearby which is that church
of St. George's that was during the nineteenth century the special
place for the celebration of "Society" weddings. North of Oxford
Circus, Regent Street extends a short distance by the Polytechnic and
Queen's Hall to where it appears to be abruptly closed by the
eighteenth-century All Souls' Church, but beyond which it is in effect
continued as the broad residential thoroughfare of Portland Place, a
tributary of Oxford Circus that has so far escaped becoming one of
those main-travelled routes along which motor buses ply.

Oxford Circus is a nexus of linking
routes rather than a starting-point. Oxford Street itself, which to the
pavement-haunting De Quincey appeared as a Mediterranean, suggests
nowadays rather the wide all-linking ocean than the land-locked sea -
such fleets of buses pass along it from places so far apart If, before
setting out eastward or westward, we inquire as to the origin of the
name of this thoroughfare, we may be given one or two explanations
either of which seems sufficiently satisfactory. One of these is that
it was of old the beginning of the Oxford road, the highway linking the
capital with the western University. This certainly seems likely
enough; but I find it recorded close upon a couple of centuries ago
that Oxford Street, then apparently but newly starting from the near
neighbourhood of the "pound" that stood to the north of the church of
St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, and Oxford Market, which lay somewhat to the
north of our thoroughfare near the Circus, received the name from being
"on the estate of the late Earl of Oxford". In that this one of the
main high-roads to the west was also frequently referred to as the
Uxbridge and the Tyburn road, this explanation may be the correct one.
But it matters not.

To the westward from the Circus there
are striking new palaces of modern shopping in the three-quarters of a
mile extending to the Marble Arch, and it is not surprising to find
that Oxford Street appears to share with Regent Street the distinction
of being one of London's main thoroughfares constantly characterized by
sauntering crowds. Though chiefly "a shopping centre" Oxford Street is
a highway that takes us through districts with inviting by-ways. On our
westward way, for instance, at the first point at which a road crosses
it, we may see immediately to the left the greenery of Hanover Square,
and to the right that of Cavendish Square. The latter has long been
famed as connoting the homes of distinguished doctors, while from its
north-eastern corner runs directly north-ward the straight stretch of
that Harley Street which seems of late to have succeeded to the
professional associations long connected with the Square.

Farther west along Oxford Street turns
off to the left that New Bond Street which, merging with its parent Old
Bond Street, becomes a direct link with Piccadilly just half a mile
distant A little beyond, and on the right, goes off the beginning of
Marylebone Lane. Though its houses and cottages have long since been
superseded by shops and offices, the development was not accompanied by
those widening and straightening processes by which progress so
frequently obliterates evidence of the past, and here we may still
follow the very sinuosities of the old country lane by which Londoners
wandered out to the one-time village of St. Mary-le-bone. Yet farther
along Oxford Street we find Duke Street leading up to Manchester
Square, the northern side of which is occupied by Hertford House,
containing one of the richest collections of art treasures accessible
to the public.

Behind the shops, as we near the
western end of Oxford Street, lie large residential districts. Turnings
on the left pass down to Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares and the heart
of Mayfair; those on the right lead to Portman, Bryanston, and other
well-known residential squares and their tributary streets. A branching
bus route at Oxford Street goes off for Baker Street, Regent's Park,
Lord's Cricket Ground, the Zoological Gardens, St. John's Wood,
Finchley Road, and a veritable new world of north-western suburbs;
while up Portman Street, the next turning beyond, on a clear day we can
see away over Regent's Park to the Northern Heights - one of the few
glimpses of those heights still left to us from amid London's crowding
accumulation of buildings. At the end of Oxford Street - passing on the
left Hereford Gardens, the last residential strip remaining in the
street of shops - we come to the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park,
with the fine Marble Arch now standing isolated from the park to which,
for upwards of half a century, it gave entrance. Originally this arch -
built of marble from the famous Italian quarries at Carrara, and
designed after the arch of Constantine at Rome - stood outside
Buckingham Palace, but it was removed to its present site at the time
of the Great Exhibition of 1851. (When originally designed it was to
have been surmounted by the statue of George the Fourth which now
stands in Trafalgar Square.) Just inside the park here may generally be
seen - on fine afternoons and evenings - crowds of varying size
gathered about people airing their views on political, social, or
religious matters.

To the left, as we reach the Marble
Arch, goes off - along the eastern side of the park - Park Lane, the
way of large mansions and crowded dwellings of the well-to-do.
Immediately beyond the arch, in the middle of what is now the broad
roadway, stood of old the ghastly gallows tree of Tyburn, and from it
to the right runs the Edgware Road to Paddington, Maida Vale, Kilburn,
and other populous suburbs. Beyond the Marble Arch the westward road,
along the north side of Hyde Park and its neighbour Kensington Gardens,
becomes Bayswater Road, and later the Uxbridge Road, and may be
followed for a number of miles through suburbs to the western boundary
of Middlesex.

Harking back once more to Oxford
Circus and going eastward, we still find Oxford Street a highway of
shops, with many turnings going off southwards into Soho, and northward
to districts into which Soho's foreign "colonies" seem ever more
extending. On either side the by-ways lead to places associated with
notable people of the past, more especially of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, for the highway that we are following here
runs through a comparatively modern part of central London. Where
Tottenham Court Road turns off to the left and the new Charing Cross
Road and old Bloomsbury High Street fork off to the right, we reach the
end of Oxford Street itself in St. Giles Circus. Beyond this crossing
point of various routes our way becomes New Oxford Street. Looking down
High Street we see the eighteenth-century church of St.
Giles-in-the-Fields, near where of old stood a lepers' hospital.
North-ward up the Tottenham Court Road - leading to "bleak Hampstead's
swarthy moor" and the north - we see a busy way of shops, with the
massy buildings of the Young Men's Christian Association showing near
at the corner of Great Russell Street.

Though New Oxford Street was only
formed in the middle of last century, it takes us at once into more
storied districts, though the story, could we pause to listen to it, is
not always a pleasant one. This thoroughfare was cut through one of the
worst of London's old slum districts, the "Rookery" of St. Giles, which
here merged into Bloomsbury and the district of St. Giles, further
greatly cleared and improved within the memory of many of us, lies to
the south with the once notorious Seven Dials lying midway between us
and Charing Cross. Continuing east we come to where in close proximity
Shaftesbury Avenue, with its duplicated beginning, and Drury Lane go
off to the right, while to the left Museum Street leads in a few
hundred yards to the British Museum, that great treasure-house wherein
is epitomized as it were the history of man in the world. When,
something under two centuries ago, the mansion of Montague House became
the nucleus of the Museum, it stood more or less alone in its fine
grounds with fields and farms in the neighbourhood, and the sinister
Field of Forty Footsteps immediately to the north. Now it is the centre
of the long-fashionable residential district of Bloomsbury. Where the
short turning goes to the Museum there branches from our main highway
Hart Street, with on the left the church of St. George's, Bloomsbury,
"at once the most pretentious and the ugliest ecclesiastical edifice in
the metropolis ", the spire of which is surmounted by a statue of King
George the First in Roman disguise. Hart Street, with its continuations
Theobald's Road, Rosebery Avenue, etc., slanting across many of our
north-going roads, is the nearest route to Shoreditch, Kingsland,
Hackney, and other north-eastern districts.

A little farther to the east and New
Oxford Street ceases, the highway continuing successively as High
Holborn, Holborn, and Holborn Viaduct into the City. Shortly we have on
the left Southampton Row going on through Bloomsbury to the great
termini of the northern railway lines: Euston, St. Pancras, and King's
Cross. The broad road to the right is the new Kingsway, its fine
substantial buildings leading the eye to the northern front of that
massive and impressive Bush House at which we glanced in the Strand.
Passing along Holborn we have, behind the shops on our left,
successively Bedford Row and Gray's Inn, and behind those on our right
Lincoln's Inn and its Fields and Chancery Lane - districts long
associated with the fraternity of the Law, and each inviting to
exploration of byways. Where Gray's Inn Road comes in on our left from
King's Cross, stood of old Holborn Bars, to indicate the western limit
of the jurisdiction of the City of London. Here now stands Toft's
effective monument to those of the City Regiment who fell in the Great
War. Here, too, at the entrance to Staple Inn, is the range of old
timbered Tudor houses that form the chief survival of domestic
architecture of that period left to London, contrasting greatly with
the big offices and shops. Just beyond, the red-brick buildings of the
Prudential Assurance Society cover the ground that was of old
Furnival's Inn where Charles Dickens once dwelt. Then an unusually
narrow turning is the beginning of Leather Lane, while nearly opposite
to it, a mixture of small, old-fashioned, dingy shops and large
printing works, Fetter Lane, bearing little evidence that it has an age
of some six hundred years, goes down to Fleet Street.

Where Charterhouse Street forks off to
the left by Farringdon and Smithfield Markets to the Charterhouse, we
are in the immediate neighbourhood of Hatton Garden, celebrated as
centre of the diamond trade, and Saffron Hill, associated more
particularly with the humbler members of London's Italian colony. On a
Saturday evening or Sunday when foot passengers and road traffic are
fewest, a glance along Charterhouse Street from this point of Holborn
Circus reveals a curiously "foreign" scene, with the small, domed
turrets of the meat-market leading the eye on to the distant trees of
Charterhouse Square.

Passing on the right that celebrated
place associated with popular preaching, the City Temple, and between
the business premises of Holborn Viaduct - constructed to span the
"valley" along which the old Fleet Ditch meandered to the Thames - we
come to the central part of that Viaduct, and looking over the
balustrade get a view of busy Farringdon Street, on the right, to
Ludgate Circus, and on the left to the markets just mentioned. A little
farther on, where the Old Bailey branches off along the western side of
the modern Central Criminal Court on the site of the old Newgate
Prison, we reach Newgate Street. Opposite the Old Bailey stands the
large church of St. Sepulchre, which, almost destroyed by the Great
Fire, was "rebuilt" and beautified" under the supervision of Wren.
Here, too, is Giltspur Street leading directly to the famous old church
of St. Bartholomew the Great, and the great hospital of that name, and
on into Smithfield.

Continuing eastward we pass along
Newgate Street, with memories of the days when the blue-coat boys of
Christ's Hospital were to be seen at their games in a playground on the
left. Passing also on the left part of the new General Post Office and
the site of the old one, we reach the busy thoroughfare of Cheapside
close to the north-eastern corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, with a
really beautiful view of the great dome of the Cathedral above green
trees. As we pass along Cheapside we see, just ahead of us on the left,
another green tree - the famous plane at the corner of Wood Street.

Almost directly opposite the plane, at
the comer of Friday Street, is a red-brick house that bears a plaque
indicating that it is the oldest house in Cheapside, having survived
the Great Fire of 1666. Though the ground floor has been altered in
accordance with modern shopping requirements, the upper part has
probably much the same appearance that it had when the old Mermaid
Tavern still stood a little farther down Friday Street.

Ahead of us is the steeple of the
church of St. Mary-le-Bow - commonly regarded as the finest of the many
greatly varied steeples with which Sir Christopher Wren dignified the
city on its rebuilding after the Great Fire. A little farther and,
glancing up King Street on the left, we get a glimpse of the Guildhall.
Then on the same side is the Hall of the Mercers' Company; and shortly
after our highway changes its name to the Poultry for the brief
distance to its termination where Queen Victoria Street comes in by the
Mansion House. Up a court on the left in the Poultry is the Hall of the
Grocers' Company. Where buildings continue on the left side our highway
takes on yet a further name, for the single block opposite the home of
the City's Lord Mayor is by itself dignified as Mansion House Street.

VI

"London, thou art the
flower of cities all."
- William Dunbar.

At the Mansion House we are not only
at the official residence of the City of London's first citizen but
also at the principal radial centre of that City's highway routes.
Ignoring lesser ways we have here the starting-point of no fewer than
eight thoroughfares: the Poultry, becoming in a few hundred yards
Cheapside, will take us away to the westward by the route which we have
just glanced along; broad Queen Victoria Street goes south-westward to
Blackfriars Bridge and the Embankment; narrow Walbrook to the south
forms the nearest link with Cannon Street and the river; King William
Street goes south-eastward by the Monument to London Bridge; eastward
run Lombard Street (becoming Fenchurch Street) and Cornhill (becoming
Leadenhall Street) in opposing curves that meet at Aldgate and continue
under a succession of names away to the eastern suburbs; between the
Royal Exchange and the Bank of England the quaintly named Threadneedle
Street leads to Bishopsgate and so to the north; at the farther side of
the Bank is the brevity of Princes Street, leading to Moorgate Street
and the City Road and so to the one-time "merry" Islington. Several of
the streets named are closely bound up with the history of the City,
indicating markets that were holden here in mediæval days, or the
settlement of certain merchants, and to-day these names connote the
fact that we are in what is still the commercial centre of the capital,
for several of them have come to be used as synonymous with the special
business that has been or still is transacted therein.

Before setting off on any of the
highway routes indicated, we may pause at our central point. The
Mansion House is a modern addition to civic life, having been built in
the middle of the eighteenth century, before which time the Lord Mayor
had no official residence. Turning our back upon its pillared portico
of Portland stone, we have in front of us the corner of the low but
massive grey stone buildings of the Bank of England, "the old lady of
Threadneedle Street". To the right of it is the fine pillared portico
of the Royal Exchange, built in the mid-nineteenth century in place of
that one which, destroyed by fire in 1838, had replaced Sir Thomas
Gresham's original building that had disappeared in the devastating
conflagration of 1666. The large grasshopper vane, conspicuous on the
campanile, and some tessellated pavement within, are all that remain of
Gresham's building. Many statues and fine frescoes by modern British,
painters are to be seen within.

As that route which continues more or
less directly the one from the west, we may glance first along
Cornhill, head-quarters of many insurance offices, and Leadenhall
Street - their junction being marked by the crossing of Gracechurch
Street - and so pass out of the City. As we start along Cornhill, the
handsome four-turreted tower of St. Michael's shows above the offices
on the right, like the much-admired tower of Magdalen of Oxford on
which Wren modelled it In Leadenhall Street stood that India Office in
which Charles Lamb was clerk for many years. The small church of St.
Andrew Undershaft, at the corner of St. Mary Axe, escaped destruction
in the Great Fire. At Aldgate the still somewhat narrow City highways
give place to what Sir Walter Besant described as one of the broadest
and noblest of all the approaches to London. He also noted that the
part of outer London through which this highway passes to the City, is
one less known to the generality of English people "than if it were
situated in the wildest parts of Colorado or among the pine forests of
British Columbia". At Aldgate - with Houndsditch going off to the left
up to Bishopsgate, and Minories off to the right down to the Tower - we
are at the beginning of that extensive intermingling of districts known
comprehensively as the East End, with our main route through it going
on by way of Whitechapel, Mile End, and Bow, to the Essex suburbs of
Ilford, Seven Kings, and other brick and mortar extensions reaching out
to Romford and the rusticities.

At Whitechapel we are in the centre of
that quarter which has long had the reputation of being London's most
populous ghetto, and more especially the district into which, for many
decades, poorer Jewish immigrants have found their way. Here street
marketing is a feature of the neighbourhood, while a very old market
survival is to be recognized in the frequent sight of a number of
carts, piled high with trusses of hay, ranged down the centre of the
road. Just beyond Aldgate Station there goes off on the left that
Middlesex Street which is better known to fame as Petticoat Lane, scene
of a widely-known Sunday street market for the sale of unconsidered
trifles acquired by modern representatives of Autolycus in all parts of
the metropolis. In Commercial Street, which goes off shortly to the
left, are St. Jude's Church (with paintings and external mosaic by G.
F. Watts), and Toynbee Hall, for many years famous as a centre from
which young University men, indefatigable in well-doing, have sought to
diffuse sweetness and light through drab and dreary districts. At
Toynbee Hall, over thirty years ago, were begun those loan exhibitions
of fine art in which originated the Whitechapel Art Gallery now
established in the main thoroughfare. To the right, opposite Commercial
Street, start Leman Street and the Commercial Road, leading to the
un-lovely yet strangely fascinating " dockland" - Shadwell, Wapping,
Limehouse, Millwall, wherein is to be seen much of depressing monotony,
but also may be found a number of quaint and picturesque nooks and
corners - and so to Blackwall and its mile-long tunnel linking the
Thames-divided counties of Essex and Kent. Through that tunnel we may
travel by omnibus to Greenwich and Deptford.

Returning to the Mansion House, we may
glance along the highway of King William Street. It leads from the
church of St. Mary Woolnoth, one of the most individual of London
churches, but now woefully disfigured by having a tube station built
about its base. St. Mary Woolnoth, by the way, was for over a quarter
of a century in the charge of John Newton, part author, with Cowper, of
the "Olney Hymns". This route takes us between fine imposing modem
business premises, across the junction of Cannon Street with Eastcheap
- where, on a solid granite base, stands the statue of William IV - and
so past the lofty Monument at the confines of Billingsgate Market on
the left, and between the old church of St. Magnus and the substantial
Hall of the Fishmongers' Company, on to London Bridge, and the famous
view down the Thames of the Pool with its shipping, and of the fine
Tower Bridge, and affording a glimpse on the left bank of the ancient
Tower of London itself. Across the bridge we enter Southwark, rich in
story and associations, but with little to claim the lingering
attention of the bus-top traveller. Beyond, we may pass into the
ramifying ways that lead to the many districts of South London, and so-
farther afield to pleasant, still countrified suburbs.

South-westward from the Mansion House
is Queen Victoria Street, which was finished little more than half a
century ago, and is largely given over to shops .and wholesale business
premises. A little way along it crosses narrow Watling Street, still
retaining the name of the old great Roman highway of which it is but a
brief lane-like remnant, and Queen Street going north to King Street
and Guildhall, and south to Southwark Bridge. Immediately after we
cross Cannon Street, with St. Paul's Cathedral a short distance on the
right, and go on down the broad way of modern business premises, past
the picturesque College of Arms and the Times offices, to the junction
with the City's oldest thoroughfare, Upper Thames Street, just before
reaching the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge, and the beginning of
the Embankment.

Yet two other routes from the Mansion
House fall to be noted - separated by the massy angle of the Bank. To
the right, by Threadneedle Street (with an early turn into the misnamed
Broad Street) we may go on into Bishopsgate Street, which lost the last
of its famous old houses when the fifteenth century Crosby Hall was
removed piecemeal to Chelsea a few years ago; portions of another
famous Bishopsgate residence, that of Sir Paul Pindar, may be seen in
the Victoria and Albert Museum. Memories of an ancient priory are
preserved here in Great St. Helens and other place names, and the old
church of St Helens is full of interest. Continuing past the end of
London Wall on the left, and Houndsditch shortly after on the right, we
reach the corner of the great railway terminus of Liverpool Street.
Continuing alongside the station we may go on through Spitalfields -
long celebrated as centre of the silk-weaving industry - to Shoreditch.
Here to the left, through Finsbury and Clerkenwell, a road goes back
into the west central district near the British Museum, while to the
right the Hackney Road passes through thickly populated districts in
little more than a mile to the western end of the beautiful Victoria
Park, bordered here by the same canal that bounds the north side of
Regent's Park some four miles due west. Followed still farther from
Shoreditch our main highway will take us through northern residential
districts to Tottenham and Edmonton, by that road along which John
Gilpin had his impetuous but involuntary ride.

The route along Princes Street, to the
left of the Bank of England, is mainly taken by buses that have their
terminus at Liverpool Street. This way leads to Moorgate Street and the
Finsbury district, and so by the City Road to Islington.

VII

"Ho! Ho! - to Islington."
- Sir William Davenant.

There are, very roughly parallel,
three main east-and-west routes running through London: that which
passes through the City and along the Strand; that far longer one the
main portion of which is denominated Oxford Street; and that yet
farther to the north at which we will now glance. All these routes by
more or less abrupt twists and turns towards their eastern terminations
may be followed to the City centre at the Mansion House.

Perhaps the best of the many radial
centres along this highway at which to start considering the whole is
that familiar to generations of Londoners as " The Angel, Islington" -
a regular starting-point for the north in the pre-railway days, and for
generations one of outlying London's well-known landmark hostelries,
lately become one of the tea-houses of these more temperate times. Of
the many thoroughfares to be followed from this point we may consider
first that which, going eastwards and trending ever more southerly,
will take us in something less than two miles to the centre of the City
at the Mansion House. This begins as the broad City Road, and almost at
once a turning on the left invites irresistibly all good Elians, for it
is Colebrooke Row where Charles Lamb and his sister lived for several
years in a house that still stands. After our highway has turned
definitely south for some distance, we come to where, on the right,
thickset trees and tombstones show we have reached the famous, deeply
impressive Nonconformist burial-ground of Bunhill Fields, an old
cemetery become a new public garden. Therein are buried many famous
persons, including John Bunyan, George Fox, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts,
and William Blake. It would be well if the authorities who have this
extremely interesting ground in their keeping were to appoint an "Old
Mortality" to maintain the tombstone inscriptions in a legible state,
though it is to be feared that a large proportion of them have already
been left too long to time's obliterating touch. Immediately contiguous
to Bunhill Fields - though mainly shut off by its massive castellated
buildings from the roadway - is the yet more extensive Artillery
Ground, the exercising place since Tudor times of the Honourable
Artillery Company. Practically opposite, on the left, is Finsbury
Square, and then by Finsbury Pavement and Moorgate Street we enter once
more at London Wall into the heart of the City.

A turning that goes more southerly
from the Angel is also one that runs down into the City. This is
Goswell Road, which later merges in Aldersgate Street and so reaches
St. Martins le Grand and the western end of Cheapside. In this highway
of shops and business premises it is no longer possible to pick out the
likely house in which Samuel Pickwick took "apartments for a single
gentleman" with Mrs. Bardell. That "domestic oasis in the desert of
Goswell Street" has disappeared - and some time during last century
Goswell Street became Goswell Road.

Washhouse Court, Charterhouse
Part of the old monastic buildings that remain incorporated in the
hospital founded early in the seventeenth century as a home for poor
and old gentlemen.
Running roughly parallel with that road
and yet more directly south is St. John's Road, passing through
Clerkenwell - long celebrated as centre of London's watch-making
industries - to Smithfield and just to the west of the fascinating old
buildings of the Charterhouse. If there is little that is attractive in
this much modernized old thoroughfare itself, it is the way of access
to places of interesting association - and as much might be said of
most of the great city's high-ways. To the right as we pass down from
the many-parting ways at the Angel are Myddelton Square and other
places reminding us of that Sir Hugh who more than three centuries ago
brought London its first large external water-supply by means of the
New River. Close against the old New River Head (now offices of the
Metropolitan Water Board) is that home of many memories for the older
generation of London's playgoers, Sadler's Wells Theatre. The "Wells"
is now in Rosebery Avenue, that new but unattractive highway which was
some years ago cut through a dingy district and runs south-westward to
the Gray's Inn Road by Holborn Town Hall. Continuing down the St John's
Road we reach at its southern end a network of old and new Clerkenwell
by-ways, the principal place of general interest in which is the
ancient but much restored St John's Gatehouse - all that remains of the
Priory of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem which once stood here.
After being put to most varied uses during the centuries that followed
on the suppression of the Order, the Gatehouse has appropriately become
the head-quarters of the revived Order of St. John of Jerusalem and of
the St. John Ambulance Association.

St. John's
Gatehouse, Clerkenwell
All that remains, and that much restored, of the ancient Priory of the
Order of St. John of Jerusalem established in the twelfth century.
Northwards from the Angel the highway begins as the busy shopping
centre of High Street, Islington - vastly changed from when it was
actually the village main street - shortly to fork, the left branch,
known as the Liverpool Road, taking us past the Royal Agricultural Hall
up to Holloway and a network of northern suburbs. The right branch is
itself bifurcated into Upper Street, leading into Highbury, and the
Essex Road going north-eastward by Canonbury and on to Hackney and
other populous districts. Between these roads, near their beginning,
lies all that remains of Islington Green - reminder of the days when
this was a village to which London's citizens came in search of simple
rustic recreation. At Canonbury is an old brick tower from which a
goodly view is to be gained over the vast tract of London; one
tradition says that it was part of a hunting lodge to which Queen
Elizabeth was wont to come; another that Oliver Goldsmith here did some
of the varied work which he undertook for bookseller taskmasters.

Longest and most notable of our
highways from the Angel is that which runs westward with a southerly
trend. Beginning as the broad and, for London, steep Pentonville Road,
it takes us past no fewer than half a dozen of London's railway termini
in little more than three miles. At the foot of Pentonville Read - just
beyond where the Caledonian Road goes off to the right - we reach the
dingy squat ugliness of King's Cross. By Caledonian Road, or by the
York Road, running along the eastern side of the station, we may make
for the northern suburbs by way of that celebrated Caledonian Market
which, though primarily a cattle market - the largest in the world, it
is said - has come to be celebrated as one of the City's most
attractive street markets. There, on Friday mornings, is to be seen
displayed the most extraordinary diversity of second-hand wares. Almost
immediately opposite King's Cross, Gray's Inn Road goes off to the
south through a somewhat depressing district of small streets in
process of change, past the large Royal Free Hospital on the left; a
little farther on, on the right Guilford Street goes off, leading past
the Foundling Hospital into the heart of Bloomsbury. By Gray's Inn Road
we may reach Holborn Bars with the quaint old row of timbered Tudor
buildings of Staple Inn directly in front of us.
Immediately to the west of King's Cross - and strikingly in contrast
with it - is the great chateau-like station of St. Pancras, London's
finest railway station thus close-neighbouring its ugliest A little
farther along, on the left, is the Greek-porticoed church which gives
its name to the immediate district. Nearby is the beautiful tree-grown
space on either side of our highway, Endsleigh Gardens and Euston
Square. Through an opening, in the middle of the latter is Euston
Station. The green stretch of the highway here is but an emphasized
feature of the greater part of this route. After crossing Gower Street
and the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Hampstead Road we shortly
reach Portland Road, with the south-eastern portion of Regent's Park
just to the north, the handsome square between giving an unbroken
stretch of greenery. The various turnings on the left give more or less
direct connection with Oxford Street. Where High Street goes off to the
left, the corner house (Devonshire Terrace) was for a dozen years the
home of Charles Dickens, and remains much as it was in his time. On the
right is the Royal Academy of Music, and next we reach Marylebone
Church (where in 1846 Robert and Elizabeth Browning were married), and
a little farther along on the right is the palatial, red-brick,
creeper-clad building in which is housed the famous collection of
waxworks known all the world over as "Tussaud's". Here, too, we reach
the triple Baker Street Station - giving by "Tube", "District", and
"Metropolitan", access to all parts of London and out into the counties
of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Here we cross the broad Baker
Street, which to the right would take us almost immediately to the
south-western corner of Regent's Park and along by Lord's Cricket
Ground into St. John's Wood. Continuing westward, we find the high-way
avenued with trees, the old-fashioned houses that still remain on the
right having long forecourt gardens. Left are tall blocks of flats,
contrasting with the handsome stone Marylebone Town Hall. A little
farther on the large red-brick building, creeper-clad, is the hotel
forming the road front of Marylebone Station. Then come several
hospitals established here when Marylebone was still a district of
"fields", and where the main highway bends to the left immediately
before terminating in the Edgware Road half a mile from the Marble
Arch, we turn to the right, and by Chapel and Praed Streets may shortly
reach Paddington, the last terminus along a highway of railway
stations.

VIII

"St. George's Fields are
fields no more."
- Old Ballad.

The highways of London are so many and
so varied, each in its turn affording means of access to by-ways
innumerable and inexhaustible, that it is not possible here to do more
than indicate some of the principal ones radiating from a few more or
less definitely marked centres. Though oldest London may be said to be
within the City confines, and most of the ancient buildings and centres
of interest are on the north side of the Thames, yet the south side has
come to be extensive enough to form a very considerable city by itself.

The Thames from below Waterloo Bridge
Among the finest of London's river views is that citywards from near
the southern end of Waterloo Bridge, and it is enhanced if seen from
the foot of the bridge steps.
In earlier sections I have pointed out
from time to time where highway routes cross the Thames and lead to the
southern portions of the great metropolis and to the suburbs spreading
fanwise far into the neighbouring counties of Surrey and Kent. It may,
however, be well to take one of the transpontine radial centres and
indicate, though with brevity that means the exclusion of much worthy
of note, some of the one-time villages that have been absorbed in the
great whole which we know as London. Perhaps the best for present
purposes is that from which, by ways more or less indirect, all the
others could be reached. This is St George's Circus, whence half a
dozen roads go off in various directions - and five of them lead to as
many of the bridges over the Thames, the most distant being London
Bridge just a mile to the north-east The Borough Road, Joining the
Borough High Street starting east from the Circus, is the highway in
that direction, and the Borough High Street is the Southwark end of
that Old Kent Road which was probably the main way from south-east
England to London even before the coming of the Romans. Directly north
from St. George's Circus we may go to Blackfriars Bridge in somewhere
about three-quarters of a mile, passing the long celebrated home of
"transpontine melodrama", the Surrey Theatre, on the left, and later,
on the right, the old Rotunda, a century ago famed as the place where
Rowland Hill was preaching. On this south side, along the river between
London and Blackfriars Bridge, was that Bankside famous in the annals
of the Elizabethan stage. The Waterloo Road goes straight
north-westward, passing the "Old Vic" and Waterloo Railway Station, to
the fine bridge of the same name, with a grand down-river view,
especially from the base of its granite piers on either bank. Westward
is the Westminster Bridge Road, which follows a more devious course,
reaching the bridge after which it is named between the magnificent new
London County Hall and St. Thomas's Hospital, buildings which, it may
be hoped, indicate the beginning of the beautifying of the south side
of the river. South-westward goes the Lambeth Road, reaching the river
at the Lambeth Bridge, by the ancient palace of the Archbishops of
Canterbury.

Those five highways, each terminating
within a mile at one of the Thames bridges, indicate something of the
broad, sweep of the river as it passes through London, and many of the
crossways linking them are worth exploring, though there is here no
opportunity for any detailed story. The sixth of our ways, starting
from St. George's Circus, is the London Road, a way of shops leading
shortly to what is perhaps south London's most important junction of
many ways - the Elephant and Castle, where tubes, trams, and buses
converge from all points. Hence the New Kent Road runs to join the Old
Kent Road and so to lead us to New Cross, Lewisham, Blackheath, Lee,
and other now populous districts, that but a few generations ago were
merely rural centres. The Walworth Road, going more directly south,
takes us to Camberwell, Herne Hill, Dulwich, and the Norwood district
dominated by the Crystal Palace, which, on its high hill at Sydenham,
is a landmark for many miles around. More westerly but still with a
southward trend goes the highway which, beginning as Newington Butts,
passes the Metropolitan Tabernacle (rebuilt since it provided a pulpit
for that extraordinarily popular preacher, C. H. Spurgeon) and so goes
on to Kennington Park - one of south London's more beautiful oases -
with, behind the houses on the right, that celebrated cricketing centre
"The Oval". Beyond the park the highway forks: one branch going to
Brixton, Streatham, Croydon and so to the residential centres spreading
ever farther into Surrey; while the more direct highway goes on by
Stockwell to Clapham, Balham, Tooting, Maiden, Wimbledon, and other
suburbs along the southern side of Thames.

IX

"Sweete Themmes! runne
softly, till I end my Song."
- Edmund Spenser.

"The Grapes", Limehouse
A riverside "bit" on the left bank, the quaintness of which is noted by
many who pass along the highway of the lower Thames.
London's
most ancient highway has come to be most curiously neglected. By the
most ancient highway, of course, I mean the River Thames, that river
which, in days of old, was not only the way of pageantry but was also,
certainly up to the close of the seventeenth century, the route most
frequently followed by those wishing to journey between the centre of
business activities in the City and Westminster the centre of
political, legal, and Court activities. Now it has not merely ceased to
be in general use as a highway, but its banks have been only partially
preserved for public purposes. Thus embankment schemes, inaugurated and
carried out during the latter half of the nineteenth century, have
provided us with a noble riverside way stretching from the City to
Chelsea, but it is discontinuous, being broken here and again by
bank-side buildings. So fine is that riverside way that it is a dream
of many that the great work should be undertaken of an embankment along
the southern bank of Thames, and .London's great river highway come to
be worthily treated. Though the initial attempts at architecturally
beautifying that southern bank - the long range of St. Thomas's
Hospital buildings opposite the Houses of Parliament and the dignified
beauty of the London County Hall - have been made too near to the river
wall to permit of an open embankment, it may well be hoped that later
plans will include such an embankment down stream from the County Hall
One scheme for the utilizing, modernizing, and beautifying of the river
highway is that of adding new bridges at Charing Cross and St. Paul's
and erecting upon them rows of shops, and so linking London south of
the Thames with London north of the Thames, as to make them more truly
a single great city than they can be when divided by "a dreary waste of
road" carried across the river.

River Steps, Waterloo Bridge
From immediately below is to be had an impression of the massive
proportions of what the great Italian scukptor Canova described as "the
noblest bridge in the world".
However, my concern at the moment is with
London's highways as they are, and here we follow the riverside highway
from where it starts by the northern foot of Blackfriars Bridge. From
here to Westminster Bridge it is a handsome avenued way, something less
than a mile and a half in length, following the great sweeping bend of
the Thames, along which its course turns from south to north at the
latter bridge to west to east at the former. Though pleasant stretches
of greenery, the Temple Gardens and later the triple extent of the
Embankment Gardens - dotted with statues and memorials to famous men -
occupy a goodly proportion of the way, on our right there is also a
goodly variety of impressive buildings. Among the first of these comes
the City of London Schools, then, beyond the tree-grown lawns of the
gardens, come the varied buildings of the Temple. The next outstanding
feature, as we approach Waterloo Bridge, is the river front of the
much-weathered Somerset House, the black and white of its Portland
stone contrasting with the grim greyness of the massive but graceful
granite bridge. Next, lofty many-windowed hotels are followed by the
low buildings of the terraced Adelphi and the ugliness of Charing Cross
railway station and bridge, before reaching which we pass the
sphinx-guarded "Cleopatra's Needle" on our left and on our right a
beautiful embayed sculpture, tribute of Belgium's gratitude for British
hospitality to her refugees during the Great War. Beyond Charing Cross
Bridge again is the somewhat ornate block of the National Liberal Club
and Whitehall Court. Then come the "garden backs" of Whitehall
buildings until we reach the massive dignity, as of some mediæval
stronghold, of New Scotland Yard, shortly beyond which, and forming the
termination of this section of our riverside highway, rises four-square
Big Ben, the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament.

On the riverside of our highway here
we have, as we pass up this sweeping bend of Thames, good views of the
successive bridges, and of the higgledy-piggledy picturesqueness of
factories, wharves, and miscellaneous buildings that have long held the
right bank of the river in central London. As we near the end of this
section we come to the new eagle-topped memorial to the British airmen
killed in the Great War, and beyond across the water see the dignified
beauty of London's new County Hall.

Houses of Parliament from the Embankment
Approaching Westminster by the plane-avenued Embankment, we see the
Airmen's Memorial by the riverside, and have the view terminated by the
handsome clock tower of "Big Ben".
To
continue along the riverside we must for a brief while leave the river
and pass between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey,
getting back to it beyond the graceful Victoria Tower, where our way
successively becomes Abington Street, Millbank Street (reminder of the
old name of the district hereabouts), and - beyond the Lambeth Bridge -
Grosvenor Road. Opposite Lambeth Bridge goes off the Horseferry Road,
reminder of the pre-bridge days when there was a ferry for horses at
this point. It is only here that we get actually back to the river-side
- with a glimpse across the water of the archi-episcopal palace of
Lambeth. From this point, with the exception of a stretch neighbouring
Vauxhall Bridge, we may for about two and a half miles keep closely
alongside the Thames. Shortly on our right we have the Tate Gallery of
Modern British Art, beyond which is little to hold the attention as we
pass through the riverside portion of Pimlico. Beyond the Grosvenor
Road railway bridge, however, we come to Chelsea Bridge and a very
pleasant stretch of our highway; on the right are the grounds of
Chelsea Hospital fronting the old stone-faced home of the picturesque
veteran pensioners. On the opposite side of the river - stretching for
nearly three quarters of a mile - is the refreshing greenery of
beautiful Battersea Park. Farther along on the right is the remaining
fragment of the fragrant old Chelsea Physic Garden, belonging to the
Society of Apothecaries. Small as it is, it is a delightful scrap of
old-time London. Beyond Albert Bridge we reach Cheyne Walk - the famous
Chelsea river frontage associated with a large number of famous artists
and men of letters - Carlyle (of whom there is a statue in the
gardens), Whistler, Rossetti, Turner, George Eliot, and others.
Carlyle's house, which is a little way up the turning known as Cheyne
Row, is preserved as a memorial A little beyond again is Old Chelsea
Church with its massy tower. Though dating from the twelfth century
this picturesque edifice is mainly of the sixteenth and has much to
interest the visitor both within and without. By Battersea Bridge - in
the neighbourhood of which recent years have, seen many changes - our
riverside highway comes to an ending, though Cheyne Walk may be
continued yet farther, into a region of gas-works or short turnings, to
the right taken to the King's Road and into the populous Brompton
district, and so to Fulham, Hammersmith, and other westerly
neighbourhoods.

Though I have described this route
outwards from its City beginning, those who would follow it in its
entirety - a walk of about four and a half miles - will perhaps find it
more variedly picturesque by taking it in the down-stream way from the
bridge at Battersea to that of Blackfriars. As a single highway it may
be said to reveal more of the variety, beauty, and manifold interests
of London old and new than any other, and by linking with Upper and
Lower Thames Streets, though perforce divided from the river by
buildings, we may follow the ancient riverside way to the Tower of
London and the open river bank once more. There is a story of an
enthusiast who described the Thames to a transatlantic visitor as
"liquid history", and to follow the course of the stream from the
western suburbs of London to the neighbourhood of dockland is to be
made to realize how essentially true are the words of that enthusiast.